Every radio dealer is looking to increase revenue, usually by attempting to increase leads, but this is only half of the equation. If you’re increasing leads but missing sales opportunities, you aren’t really getting any closer to increasing revenue, are you?
You may have heard the term come up in a Motorola presentation, most likely passing it over because it sounds like another new-age theory that won’t last. The term we are referring to is ‘Smarketing’ and trust us, it’s here to stay. It stands for the alignment between ‘sales and marketing’ and if you aren’t doing this effectively, it could be costing you significant annual revenue.
Dealers are well-versed and skilled at pitching prospects, but the problem is that the buyer’s journey is almost entirely completed before ever talking to a salesperson. By 2020, it is estimated that 85% of their purchasing process is completed and will exclude human interaction. This means that most of your sales opportunities are getting lost between your marketing activities and sales interactions.
While your dealership definitely has some effective strategies in place, let’s dive deeper into the land of ‘Smarketing’ and uncover the top 5 reasons your team is missing sales opportunities:
1. No Communication
The most common complaint from sales is that, “marketing doesn’t generate enough quality leads.”
The most common complaint from marketing is that, “sales doesn’t work our leads hard enough.”
These complaints accurately depict what happens when each team operates in their own separate silos, not sharing their goals, strategies, or insights. The sales team knows exactly who the customers are because they engage with them every day. The marketing team knows what strategies work to attract and nurture leads. Marketing can be generating all the leads in the world but if sales isn’t telling them what works and what doesn’t, then both of your teams are wasting valuable time and money, effectively lowering your chances of closing deals by 67%.
If you truly want a shot at increasing annual revenue by as much as 20%, then you need to jump on the Smarketing train. Get both teams in the same room (or on the same call) on a regular basis, set the same revenue goals, and share what strategies are and are not effective so you can all stop wasting time and focus on making money.
2. No Customer Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a system that streamlines your sales process, providing insights into your pipeline and enabling your team to effectively manage customer and prospect information, accounts, leads, and sales opportunities all in one central location.
Do you know how many leads you have right now?
Do you know how many of those leads are converting to opportunities?
Do you know how many of your website pages your leads have accessed? Or the number of times customers open or click on the emails you send them?
If you can’t answer these questions with one click of a button, then you have already limited your sales potential. Every interaction a potential or existing customer has with your business needs to be identified and recorded. The bottom line is, the more you know about a customer, the more effective you will be at selling to them.
If your process for recording customer information relies on spreadsheets, sticky notes, or worst of all someone memory, then chances are your details and data differ from person to person. What happens when a sales rep isn’t available? Can you make sense of their records? Can you even access them?
Using a CRM will give you access to customer data from anywhere with the reliability that the information is accurate and up to date. Companies that use a CRM have increased their productivity by 34%, improved their revenue forecasting by 42%, and boosted their annual sales up to 29%. With all of the available customer data out there, why wouldn’t you choose a system that puts this information at the fingertips of your entire team?
3. No Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation refers to software that streamlines activities much like a CRM does, but goes one step further and automates sales touchpoints to deliver more high-quality leads to your sales team. This kind of automation helps to nurture potential and existing customers with highly targeted, personalized content that generates 50% more sales-ready leads that end up making 47% larger purchases.
Let’s put a scenario to marketing automation:
A prospect from the construction industry comes to your website looking for a price on two-way radios. They fill out a form to download a brochure for the MOTOTRBO XPR7550e.
How long does it take for this lead to reach your sales team?
What data do you have available about this lead?
How long does it take for your sales team to reach out to the lead?
Research shows that the odds of a lead entering the sales process, or even becoming qualified, are 21X greater when contacted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead was submitted. No matter if a lead comes to you during or after business hours, chances are you aren’t getting to them within 5 minutes. Marketing automation can fill in this gap by sending out an email that is personalized with a lead’s name, industry, what content they downloaded, and any other details that make it look like it came directly from a sales rep in record time.
This scenario only covers one of the many ways that marketing automation improves your response rates and qualifying process. The magic really happens when you integrate your marketing automation software with your CRM platform. Using one without the other encourages a divide between sales and marketing because you’re separating data and capabilities that only reach their true potential when combined.
4. No Pain Points
Do you know what keeps your prospects up at night?
What are some of the typical business challenges they face and are trying to solve?
People spend money for two reasons; to fight pain or to pursue pleasure. Since two-way radios are rarely purchased to pursue pleasure, your prospects are looking for a way to fight their pain. If any member of your team has a different understanding of your prospect’s pain points, you’re wasting time with unqualified leads or even worse, you’re not generating leads because your content doesn’t resonate with them.
71% of companies who exceed revenue and lead goals effectively communicate their prospects’ pain points through buyer personas. Buyer personas are used internally as semi-fictional representations of your ideal buyer(s) based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Buyer personas reveal insights into your buyers’ decisions, concerns, and the criteria they use to evaluate choosing you or your competitor as the solution to their pain.
The ROI is simple, when everyone on your team knows exactly what pain points drive buying decisions, all of your sales pitches and marketing content will provide prospects with a solution that your competitors can’t match.
5. No Content
You built a website and put up information about your products and services, expecting leads to start flooding in. The harsh reality is that customers don’t care about you, your products, or your services. They care about themselves, their wants, and their needs. Creating content that converts is about providing prospects with information that answers their questions and solves their problems throughout the entire buyer’s journey. Companies that produce this type of content improved their search engine traffic by 55% and have conversion rates 6X higher than compared to companies that don’t.
On average, buyers view 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep because they first need to build trust with your brand before making a purchasing decision. Having content about your products and services is important but this only targets a small percentage of leads at the very bottom of your funnel, leaving the rest of your funnel with unanswered questions and unresolved problems. Strategically using targeted content throughout the buyer’s journey can generate 3X more leads than outbound marketing and costs 62% less.
The short of it is, everyone wants something for free. Since it isn’t feasible to be dishing out free two-way radios, your biggest asset to give away is content.
Now that we’ve given you a list of reasons why Motorola Channel Partners are missing sales opportunities, how about we shift gears and talk about how to drive more sales? With over 40 years of combined experience in the two-way radio and marketing industries, our team at M4D has developed a full portfolio of marketing services designed specifically for two-way radio dealers.